Monday, January 28, 2013

" Sun News has been a strong voice supporting pro-life, pro-family and limited government ideals. This is what my show, Byline, has been about from the beginning," wrote Sun News host Brian Lilley to select supporters. "We are asking friends to help us out by signing our petition which will tell the CRTC that Sun News is a valued service that all Canadians should have access to."

"Our rivals are doing everything in their power to stop us from getting a new broadcast licence. We’re used to their tactics, but we can’t let them get away with this. We need your support. We need you to take action.
Right now we’re getting the short end of the stick. Many local cable providers are refusing to offer Sun News! In fact, we’re only allowed in 4 out of 10 households in Canada and that’s not fair."

Along with alerts in Sun Media Corp's 43 daily newspapers and over 250 community weekly papers across the country,the largest press group in Canada, and CanoeTV, Canoe.ca., plus the daily harangues from Spun News itself.Quite the little support group they have going there.About that constant Sun News refrain: "only available in 4 out of 10 Canadian households."Fagstein : Fact-checking the debate over Sun News

According to the latest CRTC Communications Monitoring Report, the major providers (Rogers, Shaw, Videotron, Cogeco and Bell) combine for 10.2 million subscribers out of 11.8 million total. According to the same report, 80% of subscribers have digital service, so that means at least 8 million of the 12 million (two thirds) could add Sun News to their service if they wanted to.

"CRTC - stop treating Canadians as ATMs for the broadcasters by dropping mandatory distribution altogether, while requiring broadcast distributors to offer all licensed channels to their subscribers in a pick-and-pay format so that at long last consumers get to decide what they want to watch and pay for."

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

The last time Sun News needed help with an online petition, Snuffleupagus and Homer Simpson were there to help, mysteriously adding their names to 80,000 others on a "Stop Fox News North" Avaaz petition in 2010, along with a number of real people like Kady and Stephen Maher who didn't sign it.

Sun News mastermind, Kornkob ethanol lobbyist, and Steve's former director of communications Kory Teneycke 'discovered' the fraudulent names and wrote it up in his Sun News column on Sept 3 2010 in a bid to discredit the petition .... only to get busted by Kady who pointed out the names on the petition were not published so how did he know about them then, huh?

The very same day Homer and Snuffy were helping out Sun News with their bogus petition entries, Kory went on CBC's Power and Politics :

"We are not nor
have we ever asked for mandatory carriage of this station where Canadians would
have to be obliged to pay. We are saying that we would like to have it offered
but theoretically it could be carried by no one ... these are all private
sector negotiations."

"Sun TV News is not, nor has it ever, asked for “mandatory carriage” by cable or satellite companies. As the critics correctly point out, this would be tantamount to a tax on everyone with cable or satellite service"

Well that was then; this is now. Now they are asking the CRTC for exactly that - mandatory carriage to be included in every basic cable package in Canada plus guaranteed placement on the lower end of the dial. Because it turns out the 'free market' they go on about so relentlessly turns out to be just another of the many many obstacles they have to overcome on their path to Spun News greatness, like Ezra wearing that orange wig above to mock Jack Layton's funeral.

Sun News Network is arguing its signal must be broadcast into every Canadian home if it is ever going to recover from losses that have already reached $17-million a year.

Sun News argues that many Canadians have expressed enthusiasm for its conservative commentary-intensive programming, and would watch the channel regularly, but they don’t know it even exists. The digital cable or satellite connections currently required to see it haven’t been adopted by enough viewers in the senior citizen demographic that Quebecor concedes it is largely appealing to.

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Our national media seems pretty exercised about Alberta tarsands bigwigs and political insiders throwing a fundraiser in Calgary for our unelected Premier Christy Clark's Liberals to slag off on the NDP :

.Update : RossK brings the "foreign special interests and their deep pocket puppets" angle to Encana's financial support for Christy. But come on, Ross, PetroChina buying 49.9% of an Encana project with an additional $1B to come over the next four years falls a whole .1% within Steve's new foreign ownership guidelines. So we're good here and no review required says Industry Canada..

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Update June 13 : The above vid has been taken down from Youtube so here's CTV's Youtube version of it :

Back to original January post ....
Dean Del Mastro and his $21,000 personal cheque to Frank Hall at Holinshed Research Group for voter ID/GOTV services are back in the news tonight asMcMaher reports the RCMP are investigatingSteve's hapless parliamentary secretary/RoboCon pointman for his various 2008 election campaign financing irregularities and their apparent ham-fisted cover-up.

"What we've done is put a face on it and a geographic location on it and a contact that becomes personal or personable all of a sudden because you can take that data and use it - it puts a name and a face and a geographic location on something and that's powerful."